


Headed West

by another_Hero



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 23:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21127160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/another_Hero/pseuds/another_Hero
Summary: Stevie frowned. “How much of your life is spent killing time between check-in and check-out?”lil dashed-off AU where Emir is totally down for Stevie to come road trip with him at the Hospies





	Headed West

**Author's Note:**

  * For [olive2read](https://archiveofourown.org/users/olive2read/gifts).

> you, conceivably: Hey, other Hero, you tagged this fix-it - what's it fixing?  
me: in This work of Fan Fiction, Emir Kaplan is not a fuckboy

“Are you serious?” said Emir. But he was grinning. He was into it. “Yeah, yeah, that sounds fun.”

“Great,” Stevie said, relieved but a little unsure how to end the conversation. “Great, I’ll just—I’ll see you later, then.”

“Well, and now, would be cool,” Emir said, still amused. “I have a few minutes.”

But someone came up to get his attention, and he was off. He gave her his room key before he left—“I might have to hang around a little after, but it’s 212”—and disappeared.

So this was a thing that was happening. When it was time, she made her awkward excuses to Mr. Rose and escaped upstairs. There were two beds in the room. That was just how these things were, and if there were two of you it was a sex bed and a sleep bed. They’d rarely _slept_ together, but Stevie sure wasn’t going to sleep in the sex bed when the other one was going to be dry.

She considered taking off the dress. She didn’t exactly feel like herself in it. But then, why feel like herself? She was in a hotel several towns away with a guy she’d hardly even spent the night with. Mr. Rose was gone, leaving her here alone with no car and no easy exit. She wasn’t _acting_ like herself.

Sitting around just waiting for Emir was out, though. That felt like the wife in a psychological thriller who was going to end up murdering her husband. She texted David: _So this is on. If I get murdered, make sure they put SHE DIDN’T GIVE A FUCK on my tombstone._ Then she took the joint out of her bag. Maybe she ought to go outside, but this was a hotel room; there wouldn’t be a smoke alarm in here. She scanned the ceiling just in case before she lit up and lay on the bed, feet sticking off the end of it. After a couple hits, she got up to put it out on the sink, which made her think to take off her makeup. She hadn’t brought anything to take it off with; she wasn’t in the habit of taking off makeup. So she got some shitty hotel lotion and some toilet paper and went to work.

She did, blessedly, get her face rinsed before she heard Emir’s key in the door; the last thing she needed was a look consisting of bits of melty toilet paper. But she was clean-faced and incongruously well-dressed when Emir came in and said, “Party started without me, huh?”

“It’s here if you want it,” she said, but she was leaning against the counter, no reason to act like she wasn’t planning on sex. Of course she hoped the joint wasn’t what he wanted

“That’s not what I want.”

They exhausted each other far enough they didn’t need to mention the newness of sleeping together and not alone, and Stevie stayed awake just long enough, on the farther side of the bed from the door with an ankle hooked around Emir’s, to feel relieved about it.

She woke up facing the window, and when she sat up, Emir looked at her and smiled.

“What?” she asked, through a grimace. This was why she couldn’t be friends with anyone but David, this thing where she grimaced when someone smiled.

“It’s good to see you,” he said.

That might have been even worse, but it was also weirdly sweet, and she was slightly concerned that she might blush.

“You’re much better-looking than my usual company,” he added.

“Which is no one?”

Emir chuckled.

“It’s good to know I’m an improvement on empty air.”

He pulled her down on top of him. “Well, maybe if it was in front of Niagara Falls or something.” He was grinning again. He thought he was funny. He wasn’t, really, but he was so _charming_. Why did she do this? This was _fun_. “You want the shower first?”

She kissed his jaw. “If that’s what you want.”

“Mm.” He leaned up to her ear. “That’s not exactly what I want.”

He wasn’t writing about that place, so he said, “Tim’s for breakfast?”

“Can’t get that in Schitt’s Creek.”

His car was normal, which in cars meant the opposite of fancy, which was preferable for any car she actually had to ride in. It meant she could slide her seat back and put her feet up on the dash. Emir smiled over at her and reached a hand over to set briefly on her leg.

Stevie really, really hadn’t prepared for the possibility of affection. She’d come ready for sex, for a good time, not a hand on her lower thigh. She _liked_ Emir, a lot, but somehow she’d been expecting, like, a bros’ road trip with fucking. She wanted to text David _he keeps SMILING at me_, but David had a boyfriend, the real kind, and would probably think that sounded perfectly normal.

It probably sounded perfectly normal.

Once she was halfway through her breakfast sandwich, because Stevie had priorities, she said, “Where are we going today?”

“Pine Bluff?”

“Wow,” said Stevie, “this really is like vacation. I hardly ever get past the Elms.”

“In fairness, there are a lot of Elms.”

“I feel like the whole county deserves a do-over in the naming department, honestly.” This was a boring thing to be talking about if she let it go on too long. “Does Pine Bluff have anything to recommend it?”

Emir shrugged. “Never been. But it’s only an hour away, and check-in isn’t until three, so I guess we’ll find out.”

Stevie frowned. “How much of your life is spent killing time between check-in and check-out?”

“I mean, I usually work then.” Anticipating her concern, he added, “I don’t have anything I need to get done today, though.”

Stevie shook her head. “I really hope there’s something in Pine Bluff.”

Emir took her hand. “There’ll be something.”

Stevie swallowed and didn’t say anything

“So, Stevie, how often do you get away from Schitt’s Creek?”

“I mean, if you count Elmdale—”

“I don’t count Elmdale.”

“Yeah, pretty much never.”

Emir grinned.

She was supposed to ask a question now, a related question, but the concept of home was a little heady for road trip breakfast, so she went with, “Is all your sex awesome motel sex?”

“Well, see, the problem with awesome motel sex is it requires having someone who’s awesome at sex with you in the motel.”

Stevie laughed abruptly, a single short _ha_. “Awesome motel masturbation.”

“But if your actual question is how much time I spend staying in motels—”

“It might have been.”

“—it depends, y’know. Usually at least a few days at a stretch. Longer the farther I’m going. Last year I did a month on Vancouver Island.”

Stevie literally could not conceive of it. That was, what, a month of driving through trees, and by the ocean, which was not a thing she’d ever seen, though she was familiar with the concept, and being judgmental, which was his job. Also probably he had to do some things to run his business, but Stevie was skeptical of the cell service on most of Vancouver Island, and it was entirely possible they had never heard of the internet there. “I’ve never been.”

Emir nodded politely. “I’d recommend it, if you ever get the chance.”

Stevie wasn’t going to get the chance. People didn’t walk into Schitt’s Creek and give you those chances. You had to invite yourself along with a hookup just to make it to Pine Bluff.

There was not, in fact, something in Pine Bluff. There was the hotel, which also contained what it called a general store but someone else might call a mini-mart. The hotel had a little patch of asphalt in front of it that contained a bus stop, and a trail led away behind it. “You must be here to hike,” said the clerk.

“Oh, we’re not,” Stevie said immediately.

Emir looked pleasantly unsurprised. “You don’t hike?”

“It’s the only way to get to the bluff,” said the clerk. “You’re dressed for it.”

Emir pretended his laugh was a cough.

“_O_kay,” said Stevie. “Let’s go for a hike.”

Emir frowned. “You know _I’m_ not going to make you do that.”

Stevie didn’t know that, really. She didn’t know much about Emir at all. But that wasn’t what she said. She said, in a faux-innocent voice, “But it’s the only way to see the bluff.” Stevie didn’t want to hike, exactly, but given that she’d only ever seen Emir in button-up shirts and oxfords, she was pretty sure he wasn’t much of a hiker. And this was—this was fun, but they couldn’t technically fuck _all_ day, and she didn’t really properly know what to do with the rest of the time—she wasn’t even sure what Emir _liked_—and here she was with his car and his job and an empty day and a desperate need for the upper hand. She was going to hike, if that was what it took. “Anyway, what are we going to do until check-in?”

She didn’t regret it as immediately as she thought. The path was dry—she’d given at least a brief moment’s concern to her feet in Chucks—and it wasn’t steep. They were basically just walking through the woods. Going for a walk together, that was something people did when they were hanging out, and it didn’t suck. Neither of them had any idea where they were going or how long the path was, but it was cut clearly, no chance of getting lost. Walking, you didn’t have to maintain a constant conversation, be ready with something to say next that led to something else to say next.

“Okay,” Emir said after a few minutes, “this is kind of weird.”

He wasn’t wrong, but—“Thank you.”

“No, I mean—we haven’t spent much time together upright. I feel like I don’t know very much about you. I definitely would not have expected to find us hiking.”

“I mean, we can turn around.”

“Oh, no, no, you started this! I’m holding out hope for a bluff.”

“All right, well, what would you like to know? I’m an open book.” She said it very seriously.

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, I might lie, and I might not answer your question, but you have at least a 40% chance of me telling you the truth.”

“Family?”

“My great-aunt left me the motel.”

He looked like he was expecting her to say something else.

She looked right back.

“That’s all you have to say about your family?”

“Most of them aren’t worth saying much.” But she gave him a break: “What about you?”

“Two brothers, two sisters, parents still alive, three grandparents still alive, two of them in Izmir, so we mostly facetime, a _plethora_ of cousins.”

“Do they all live in the same town and get together for huge family birthday parties?”

“That’s racist,” he said, flat-faced. Then he grinned. “We all go to my aunt Zeynep’s house for Kurban Bayramı. And drink a lot, which is not at all in the spirit of the holiday. My family isn’t very religious. But my siblings are all over Canada. One’s in Michigan, so, you know, Southern Canada. Usually I stay with family when I’m not working. One of my sisters just had a baby, so if I crash there, I can help take care of him and kick in a little toward their rent, and it works out.”

She felt kind of bad, now, for not telling him a single thing about herself. “Fine, okay, I have no siblings, my mom isn’t a thing, and I’m pretty sure my dad is still in jail, but only, like, 76%.”

He didn’t linger on it, just nodded. “What was your favorite subject in school?”

“Math.”

“History.”

Did this mean it was her turn for a question? “How did you end up with this job? As we have already discussed, I ended up with mine because my aunt Maureen died and the motel was still there.”

“Um, when I was younger I did a lot of budget traveling and started making friends in that community online, and it just—turned out there was a need.”

“And you were unfulfilled in a boring desk job, so you just took off.”

Emir made a face. “I wish I could say you had it wrong.”

She cackled, but: “I think it’s cool.” _Brave_ was too serious a thing to say, but she thought that too.

“I mean, it’s what you’re doing right now.”

“Except you did it for, like, your whole life, and I’m doing it for a few days.” She wasn’t sure how she’d gotten here, sober and talking openly about her feelings.

“Do you want to stay at the motel forever?”

Stevie shuddered.

“Do you want to stay at the motel for the next five years?”

“Um,” she said, “probably not.”

He didn’t keep counting down; Stevie could be grateful for that, at least.

“What’s your…favorite TV show?”

“White Collar,” Emir said. “You?”

“Orphan Black.”

They continued the back-and-forth and continued on the path until the trees cleared and they really were standing at top of a bluff. A plain stretched out ahead of them, but they had no way down.

And Stevie didn’t much want to go down anyway; she certainly wasn’t in a mood to hike back uphill. “It’s nice,” she said. “Turn around?”

They couldn’t stay in Pine Bluff the whole rest of the day—not unless they wanted chips and Skittles for lunch and dinner, and also to hang around in a parking lot for another hour and a half. Emir held up his keys. “You want to drive?”

“You’d trust me with your car?”

“What’s a huge death machine between friends.”

“Okay, but you realize I have no idea where we’re going, right?”

“Me either.” Emir shrugged. “I’ve never been here before.”

_Okay_, she wanted to say, _but I don’t. know. where we’re going._ She took the keys.

She drove the way they hadn’t come until a sign said _Bunton_ and pointed right, and then she turned. “We’re not coming to Bunton tomorrow, are we?”

Emir grinned. “I’m willing to bet Bunton isn’t big enough to have a motel, a hotel, an inn, a bed and breakfast, or a kind farmer who would let us sleep in her barn.”

“So that’s a no.”

Emir grinned, and he looked happy, actually, with her, which felt sort of like it needed correcting. “We can come to Bunton tomorrow if you’d _like_.”

“I’m willing to bet that there is nothing to like about Bunton.”

“There’ll be something.”

What there was in Bunton, it turned out, was a Chinese restaurant, a liquor store, and a church. “All right,” she said once she’d tasted a potsticker, “game plan: before we go back to the motel, we hit that liquor store, and we make sure some amount of money exists that we can pay this restaurant to deliver food to Pine Bluff.”

“Quick question. By ‘hit,’ do you mean _rob_?”

“The liquor store? I mean, if you have the experience, I have the getaway driving skills.”

Emir shook his head sadly. “And here I was, counting on you to lead me into a life of crime.”

After the sex, and the naked meme scrolling, and the further sex, after an action movie and the drinking game they made up to watch it depleted the better part of two bottles of wine, after the dinner they’d ordered to have delivered at 7:00 came at 8:30 and they ate it all and lay back on their sides of the bed, Emir turned to Stevie. “How long can you stay?” he said.

“I mean,” she said, “I’m the boss. Nobody tells me when to go to work.” But then she realized it probably sounded like she was inviting herself on a life of road tripping with Emir. “So, like, uh, some…days.”

Emir nodded. “And then what do you have to do?”

“Ugh, run my motel.”

“The motel that you don’t want to run.”

She did finger guns at him. It had been funnier in her head. “That’s the one.”

“What _do_ you want to do?”

“Aren’t I too old for this conversation?”

“Yes,” Emir said gravely, “after you turn 30, you are no longer allowed to want things.”

Stevie shook her head. “My best friend lives in the motel.”

Emir chuckled at first, but it grew into huge gasping laughs. He laughed and laughed and then Stevie was laughing too, longer than she could remember what was funny, and then they were breathing heavily on the bed, and Stevie was pretty sure she didn’t have to try to remember what they’d been talking about, pretty sure they could just not go back to it.

She wanted to reach her legs out and wrap them up in his. She didn’t want to try to remember the last time she’d touched somebody this much. There were takeout containers in the middle of the bed. She sat up and stacked the cartons and Emir realized what she was doing and got the plastic bag from the table and tied them up and took them to find a trashcan outside that was big enough.

He knocked on the door and she answered like she didn’t know who he was, and then they were making out again, Stevie and this funny and ridiculously hot guy who went wherever he wanted but was still pleased to have her with him, and she ground down on his leg experimentally because she didn’t want to be thinking anymore that she didn’t seem to know how to be free.

She tried not to be mad at Emir about it, but there were just so many times on a road trip when you could do whatever you wanted. The next day they stayed in a town with 5,000 whole people in it, and there were three restaurants, and Emir asked her what she wanted for lunch. And what did she want to do this afternoon, and did she want some ice cream, and what did she want to watch? She’d be going along enthralled, attracted, and he’d ask her to make a choice, and it was as though she’d run out of them, and she hated him for a moment. When he got her half undressed and whispered “What do you want?” in her ear from behind, she froze, and he took his hands off her and stepped around so they were facing and said, “You want to tell me what that was about?”

They weren’t—he wasn’t her _boyfriend_, but they were kind of people who talked to each other about things, now. Friends, bros who road tripped and fucked. Emir, the person she wanted to lean up against when they walked down the street, and Stevie, the person who wouldn’t let her. She probably ought to tell him what that was about.

“I don’t—it’s nothing.”

“Hasn’t inhibited the rest of our conversations.”

“You keep asking me what I want—”

Emir waited a good while for her to speak before he said, “I want to know what you want.”

“Me, too,” Stevie said.

“Cool,” he said, “but it’s a lot to think of?”

She nodded.

“I get it,” he said, though objectively he couldn’t.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Dude, when I’m on the road, like a third of days I don’t eat when I’m hungry because I don’t want to figure out where to go.”

All right, that was pathetic. Stevie breathed.

“But we can probably survive an afternoon without sex,” he chuckled.

“Hey, no one asked for _that_.”

“You want me to give you some options?”

Stevie considered. He was so attentive. The bastard would probably _check in_. “You don’t have to,” she said.

She didn’t make another decision all day, even after they left the B&B. She was escorted for a walk; her dinner was brought out to her. It was strange to be cared for, different from the dull choicelessness of Schitt’s Creek, and she ended the day relaxed and brave enough to slide up against Emir under the blanket. She didn’t prefer to sleep cuddling—she’d never believed people really successfully _slept_ that way—but it wasn’t so often that somebody wanted to touch her. “Thanks,” she murmured.

“It’s been good for me to have you,” he said. “All this stuff is easier when you need to do it for someone else.”

“Well, then you’re very welcome,” she yawned, and she stayed beside him until she was ready to fall asleep, then slid back to her own pillow, just her lower leg against Emir’s.

The B&B, of course, served breakfast, and that was an essential part of the review. Stevie had French toast, and she pocketed a muffin. Then they were on the road—no rush, but no reason to stay around.

They’d been driving less than an hour when they passed a sign for _Dinosaur Park._

“I want to go there,” Stevie said immediately, pointing.

Emir grinned. “Let’s go.”

It turned out it cost fifteen dollars to enter Dinosaur Park, and it also turned out that Dinosaur Park had a chain-link fence, so it was easy enough to decide that they’d just walk around. She didn’t see any staff except the guy at the ticket counter, so when she saw a triceratops dressed in a huge, bespoke Maple Leafs jersey—“I have to jump the fence,” she said.

Emir looked up it doubtfully.

“You can stay out here,” she said. “You can take photos just as well from this side of the fence.”

He chuckled. “You’re gonna get arrested.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not bailing you out!” But he wasn’t serious, he wasn’t worried, and of _course_ it wasn’t his job to bail Stevie out of hypothetical jail. She was already trying to climb up the fence. It wasn’t as easy as it looked when children did it in movies; her shoes were wider than the holes. But she got up, she made it, she looked back to be sure Emir was still watching, and she posed with the triceratops.

Emir saw the park staffer first—after he’d taken pictures of multiple poses, from multiple angles, fitting his phone camera to the fence gaps. Stevie, already giggly at the ridiculousness of her position, ran to the fence and clutched it next to Emir’s hands. He caught on and grabbed the same links, her fingers.

“Ma’am,” the staffer called, “you’re going to have to leave.”

Kicking out obnoxious people was the worst; Stevie went willingly, with a little wave. “I’ll wait for you!” Emir called dramatically.

She had the more direct route to the exit, so technically, _she_ waited for _him_.

“Hey,” Stevie said when they pulled into Ridling. “There’s a Walmart here. We should go there.”

Emir looked at her. “That’s what you like to do when you leave town? Go to Walmart?”

“Um, yeah? Have you ever tried to buy batteries in a small town?”

“Running out of vibrator supplies?”

“Okay, well, _they’re_ almost all rechargeable, but my _flashlight_—”

“You couldn’t have chosen something less like a sex toy than a _flashlight_?” But he was already parking near the big blue sign.

Stevie was going to roll her eyes, but then she snorted and muttered, “Flared base.”

“Okay, so, batteries.”

“Batteries,” Stevie agreed, tugging on a cart. “Granola bars, tampons, socks, frosted animal cookies, allergy medicine.”

“What are you, a prepper?”

She shrugged. “Groceries in small towns are expensive. I could also pick up some toilet paper. And some macaroni and cheese that isn’t Brebners store brand.”

Emir followed her through the store. “So, what,” he said, “if you ever leave Schitt’s Creek, you need to go somewhere with big box store access?”

“That’s setting my sights a little low, don’t you think?” She tried not to sound annoyed; instead, she tossed an extra box of cereal into the cart.

“All right,” he said, “what _would_ you want, somewhere you would move?”

Stevie kept walking. “A wine bar and a leather scene.” Neither of those things was necessary; she wouldn’t even think of them when making plans.

Emir shook his head a little, but he didn’t call bullshit. “You need ramen, right? We just passed the ramen.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, you didn’t say it, but you have the look of somebody who eats a lot of ramen.”

“Thanks,” she said, with a heavy dose of sarcasm, and she grabbed a case.

By that evening, the mood had shifted. Tomorrow they’d be home—Stevie in Schitt’s Creek, Emir in his sister’s suburb, entertaining the nephew until his next trip out—and this wouldn’t be happening again. They would be for each other like high school acquaintances who’d managed to get out of town, people you might call up if you happened to be passing through. Stevie wondered whether, if she were a better person, she ought to apologize. She rested her elbow on his shoulder instead as they walked back from a strip mall Red Lobster to their strip mall motel, crossing an oceanic parking lot on foot. Resting her elbow on his shoulder was ridiculous, but in a friendly, silly way; they’d veered too far from their original course to hold hands.

“So what do you do now?” he asked her somewhere in the middle of the tarmac.

“Oh, no,” she said, “no, you have not plied me with _nearly_ enough wine to talk about—” Anything, really. She’d managed to avoid a lot of the talking so far.

“I just thought—you’re not going to see me much, after tomorrow. Isn’t that an ideal trait for someone to talk to?”

She scrunched up her face, trying to keep her disapproval light.

“I like you, Stevie. I hope you don’t stay in Schitt’s Creek the rest of your life just because you don’t know what you want.”

_I don’t know what there _is_ to want_ sounded unbearably pathetic. Who was to say Emir did? Nobody set out for a life reviewing cheap motels. “Me neither,” she said. honestly. “Might do it, though.”

He shook his head. “You won’t. Don’t have the stamina.”

“Fuck, you’re right.” This parking lot was endless. “Guess I’ll have to do something else.”

“Let me know what it is,” he said. “I’d like to hear. Where you end up.”

“Yeah,” she said; she felt like she really might. “What about you? Motels forever?”

“Me?” he said. He was a hypocrite if he wanted to complain that she didn’t share enough. “Motels for now.”

There was still a little bit of energy about _going_, in the morning. Stevie didn’t miss home, but the appeal of road trip lawlessness hadn’t entirely worn off. So she took over the playlist and let the music be too loud, didn’t turn it down until she saw the town sign.

She hadn’t gone really wild in the store; she had few enough bags that she could carry them upstairs herself. So Emir left her outside her apartment. He didn’t kiss her goodbye, and she didn’t kiss him, but he said, “I hope you get everything you want, Stevie Budd.”

Stevie nodded. “You, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to the Rosebudd for some brainstorming, olivebranchesandredwine for inserting the name of Brebners into my brain, and olive2read for prompting this entire disaster. has anyone ever given you a het fic, olive2? bc I'm amused by doing so.
> 
> before writing this, I distracted myself by looking at photos of Ennis Esmer, who plays Emir and is wildly attractive, so [here](https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww4.pictures.zimbio.com%2Fgi%2FTribeca%2BTV%2BFestival%2BSeason%2BPremiere%2BRed%2BOaks%2BmrZrdKn2rVFl.jpg&f=1&nofb=1) [are](https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwpmedia.news.nationalpost.com%2F2011%2F02%2Fennis.gif%3Fw%3D620&f=1&nofb=1) [pics](https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww2.pictures.zimbio.com%2Fgi%2FEnnis%2BEsmer%2BC-lFKpiInRqm.jpg&f=1&nofb=1)


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